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When a person is called on to introduce one of the great legendary characters of the animated cartoon industry like the next recipient for the Annie Award, the temptation is to kind of go through the old cliches like, "I take great pleasure in presenting--", "I'm proud to give you--," "It's a thrill--" and so forth. Now those openings are really all right, but for tonight's guest, I really think we should use the word "joy," because this is the way I feel about having the honor of presenting this award. Now I'm talking about Dick Huemer, of course. And now you people sitting out there, you young people, you're going to see really the grand old man of animation. Now this is once in a lifetime. Dick's hard to get out of the house! I know we have other old timers' clubs like the Nine Old Men at Disney's of which I am supposed to be a member, but nothing in our antiquity compares to the longevity of Dick Huemer in the animation business. To give you sort of a time frame, before I was even born, Dick was doing animation flip books, and when I was but two years old, he was already a full-fledged animator working for Raoul Barre, doing "Mutt and Jeff" feature fil – artoons. And for the next 18 years, he just did about everything. He was a jack-of-all-trades in New York. He even had a comic strip in one of the New York papers. He worked for all of them. Besides Barre, he worked for the Fleischer brothers, he worked for Charlie Mintz, and he finally came out and started working for Walt Disney. […]